


My Wooden Heart

by onstraysod



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Jonathan in Venice, Weirdness, mad!Jonathan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 17:34:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7396936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jonathan Strange's descent into madness is observed by an odd pair of eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Wooden Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wraithwitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wraithwitch/gifts).



> This story is based on an image in the television series recently discovered by [etave](http://www.tumblr.com/etave) and [vicivefallen](http://www.tumblr.com/vicivefallen). You can see the post and image on Tumblr [here](http://etave.tumblr.com/post/144517901544/still-seeing-new-things-in-jonathan-strange-and).
> 
> I have owed wraithwitch a story since last autumn, a story that currently sits unfinished among my files. I was unhappy with it so I set it aside for a time and haven't made progress on it since. I may very well go back and finish it at some point, but that doesn't excuse my failure. I offer this strange little story in the meantime as an apology and I hope it will meet your approval.

He paces; he does not sleep. Sorrow flows around him like a river, a twisting whispering ribbon of black. He is aged beyond his years: there is gray in his dark hair and he gazes fearfully with an old man’s eyes. Already he wears about his shoulders his funeral vestments, a moldering coat of mottled velvet, midnight blue.

It has seen its better days. So has he. So have I.

There was a church somewhere: that much I remember. Fresco-covered walls of wood and plaster, golden halos and the red robes of saints. A candelabra left untended set ablaze a drapery and flames rained from the rafters - I was pitted by sparks and splinters, but somehow I survived. Through the clouds of ashes they came and took me down, put me in an antiquarian’s stall, sold me for a trifle of silver. Nailed me up here in the darkness like the man behind the altar with his crown of thorns.

Faces came and went in that darkness, swimming into candlelight, blurring and disappearing. They took no notice of me and I cared nothing for them. But then came the young old man, a mantle of doom on his shoulders, a thundercloud diadem on his head. I remembered murmuring voices from the confessional, tears glistening wet on wood, desperate beseeching directed to the shadowed rafters. Pain there, then. Pain here, now. So I watched him and then, one night, in the midst of his pacing, he turned his red-rimmed eyes upon me. Reaching up to grasp me, he bestowed on me a name.

_Arabella._

Is that truly my name? I do not know.

He took me down from my alcove and held me. Something in his breast knock-knocked against me, echoed through my frame, through the room. He cradled me close, turning round and round slowly, humming all the while his tuneless, one-word song. 

_Arabella_ , a whisper. _Arabella_ , a sob.

“I’ve found you, my love,” he whispered, and he pressed a kiss to the scars on my cheek. “I will never lose you again.”

On one side of the bed he laid me down, beneath a canopy darker than the starless sky. But he did not rest then: he continued to pace, accosting the shadows or some shade that lingered there, beyond the power of my sight. He lifted vials and peered into bottles, turned the pages of ancient books that crumbled in his hands. And he laughed loudly at times and wept loudly at others, and sometimes he laughed and cried at once. He was wild, glittering eyes and bared white teeth, trembling hands lifted to wet cheeks; he was madness and beauty and hurt. Sometimes he made a small, pathetic sound like children I had seen beneath me in the pews: a whine, a whimper, the primal cry of the lost.

 _Bell_ , he said. _Bell, please_.

In the church there was a bell: a great swinging chalice, hung upside down. When it rang I could feel it, a physical sound: slow and deep and mournful. A man in black robes said it had the power to summon angels and scare demons away.

That was why he wanted a bell, I reasoned. He’d sensed the demon hanging on the edges of the room. I had sensed it too.

But no bell rings and no angel comes. And the demon prowls unseen in the darkness. And the young old man drinks from little bottles and cackles and cries.

Yet now, sometimes, he lays down beside me and sleeps. And in his sleep he speaks of dreams: of falling snow and dead men shambling, of black feathers and cruel beaks and a dark tower on a lonely, distant hill. He reaches out and pulls me close against him, over and over again murmuring my name with sleep-heavy lips.

 _Arabella. Arabella_.

_Please forgive me._

I cannot answer. I was never given a tongue. But if I could I would tell him: there is nothing to forgive. You have done no harm to me.

He was not the one who severed me from the long roots that burrowed deep in the warm earth, drinking the sweet buried water. He was not the one who cut me from the tender flesh, taking me forever from the taste of golden sap. He was not the one who hewed and carved and sliced at me, forming rude limbs that would never move, a head that would never turn, lips that would never kiss.

I can still hear them, inside of me: the voices of the leaves in summer, singing.

I can feel his tears upon my cheek, the shudder of his bones.

Are there songs that he remembers and mourns for? Is there a voice he hears inside of him, a voice he’ll never hear again?

I cannot ask him.

One night he picks up an old book, opens it: it exhales a dusty breath. He stands at the bedside and reads aloud, words that are sounds without meaning, and he passes his hand up and down in the air above me, the way the silk-robed men in the church had gestured at the faces of the supplicants. And then he watches me, expectantly, and I wonder: is this what a blessing is? But after awhile he sighs and closes the book, returns to his pacing.

I feel that I have disappointed him, but I don’t know how.

In the early hours he comes to the bed, falls upon it, one hand reaching out to me.

 _Arabella_ , he murmurs from his sleep.

The candles are guttering but by their weak light I can just see his face from the corners of my eyes. With his haunted gaze shuttered he is young again; sorrow draws its marring hand away. Dark curls lay against pale skin, and breath like a gentle breeze passes through parted lips. 

I wish I could tell him of the demon that lingers near. I wish I could tell him of the bell I heard once. I wish I could sing to him the song of the leaves that echoes still inside of me. 

I wish I could learn his name and use it when he uses mine.

 _Arabella_.

He thought that his blessing had failed me, I think, the one he read from his crumbling book. But I felt something stir inside me, the way the sap used to flow in springtime when the sun rose higher, brighter, and the days began to grow long. I do not think it will continue, but for this fleeting moment I feel it: like a memory from before the church, before this city came out of the sea. 

I pull at it, gather it up, concentrate it until it is hot like a fireball inside me, like the embers that fell from the vaulted roof, stars cast out of heaven. It takes a long time, so long, and it uses every bit of that energy, but finally I manage it.

My eyes roll to peer at him, a scraping sound inside these shallow sockets. I move my arm, I reach toward him. I touch his cheek softly with my wooden hand.

For one moment I have a wooden heart and it is beating, for him.

 _Arabella_ , he whispers, still sleeping.

That one moment is enough.


End file.
